The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity. In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Ethernet as a metropolitan and wide-area networking technology imposes a new set of operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) requirements. ITU-T Y.1731 defines new Ethernet Alarm Indication Signal (ETH-AIS) functionality for fault and performance management in order to provide for these needs of service provider in large network. AIS primarily satisfies two purposes: alarm suppression so that a network management system does not receive an excessive number of redundant alarms for a particular fault; and provides faster notification to the higher-level customer domains that a transport path has failed. Thus, in response to link failure, a prior AIS module transmits corresponding ETH-AIS information individually to each of the active VLANs on the affected port (e.g., IEEE 802.1Q trunk link) in the opposite direction of the fault. In other words, a prior AIS module sends each affected VLAN a separate Ethernet frame, which is IEEE 802.1q tagged (e.g., addressed) to a single particular VLAN, with the Ethernet frame including a protocol data unit with ETH-AIS information for that single particular VLAN.